


The Fear of a Thing

by deskclutter



Category: Fables - Willingham, Stardust - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Community: 31_days, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-25
Updated: 2010-06-25
Packaged: 2017-10-10 06:35:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/96690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deskclutter/pseuds/deskclutter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A possible thing that may have happened to Tristran and Yvaine on their travels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fear of a Thing

**Title:** The Fear of a Thing  
**Day/Theme:** October 17th / the boy who could not shiver and shake  
**Series:** Stardust (book-verse)  
**Character/Pairing:** Tristran, Yvaine, an unnamed toymaker (whose identity is relatively easy to guess), an eastward wind (from Spitsbergen)  
**Rating:** G

They followed the old toymaker into his workroom, where a multitude of clocks ticked away the hour and little puppets hung motionless from the wooden pegs in the walls.Tristran wondered briefly if at night the toys came alive; the golliwogs rising to their feet, and the stiff wooden bears and elephants stretching their cramped limbs from a day's pretence at lifelessness. The large doll by the window would wreak her mischief good-naturedly among the tin soldiers clustered in a careful row beneath the mantle, and the cuckoos in the clocks would flap their wings around the room with nary a feather falling from their wooden bodies to betray their nighttime revelry.

"You see," explained the old man. "I am attempting to carve a real boy, one who believes in good and caring for one's parents in their old age."

"You are no longer a young man, I see," said Tristran.

"No," sighed the toymaker. "And I have had many failures to my name. The first child I crafted, for instance. Ah! I loved that boy. But the problem with him was that he was too inhuman, too divorced from fear. He did not understand the things real children do: parents warn their children away from strangers and bad men for a reason. He thought all was a great adventure all because he feared nothing. My poor boy. He ran away, soon after he was granted flesh, but though he had endured trial and tribulation to become that flesh, he did not know the secret of it, and squandered it far from here."

"Is he dead, then?" asked Yvaine.

"No one knows," said the toymaker. "But I have not heard from him in years. He cannot be alive. He loved me as his father."

"But was he not, as you say, inhuman?" Yvaine pressed, unequivocally puzzled.

"I misspoke," said the toymaker. "He was unhuman. This does not mean he did not have some humanity. He was very like a child who cannot grow up, those poor addled idiots you see huddled in a corner on winter days, only he was cleverer. But no matter, I will craft a new child, one whom the Blue Fairy can imbue with good qualities from the start! He will not be a disappointment to me, as my other son was. A boy made from wood can only feel so much, but it will do."

"I wonder," said Yvaine. "If a wooden boy feels little, would placing cold and wriggling fish into bed with him cause him to feel? Would he shiver or not?"

The toymaker shrugged. "If he is wooden, he cannot feel a pinch, or a bite of a nail into skin. he cannot know feeling. He has none."

"Ah," said Yvaine. "Then your misspeak was in your amendment. If a boy child cannot feel, then he cannot be human, for all that he might play at it."

"You verge on rudeness, my dear," said the toyspeaker. His face was turned to the puppets on the wall, so that half his face was bathed in light, and the other half in shadow. "It is all very well to say so after the fact, but I will create true miracles from now."

"If you will excuse me," said Yvaine. "I do believe I dislike the very nature of your experimentation, and would rather not be a party."

"It is of little consequence to me," said the toymaker. "You may leave as you came." But he said so coldly, the voice of a man too far gone to consider reason. "I will have little need of your companionship. The Blue Fairy shall see that my children do not leave me."

"That went rather well," said Tristran. "But I rather think you were upset, Yvaine."

"Upset?" said Yvaine. "I should think so! If you are alive, you feel! If you cannot, then you might as well be dead. An unfeeling lump is a dead, dead creature, and a moving doll is only an automaton."

"What I do not understand is how he can believe one living doll to be more miraculous than another," said Tristran, quietly. "One does not say, the curing of a disease is more miraculous than the raising of a man from the dead. The most miraculous aspect of a miracle is that it happened at all."

"The man is ill," said Yvaine. "And I do not wish to hear another word about him."

"Very well," said Tristran. "Shall we turn to another subject?"

"Why not?" said Yvaine.

Tristran smiled. "I hereby promise never to bring you with me past the Wall. Though I may never live to place cold fish in your bed, I should not like to carry with me a dead creature."

"What an absurd subject!" exclaimed Yvaine, blushing hotly. "If you should dare to put cold fish in my bed, Tristran Thorne, you may depend on your death the very next moment!"

"Not I," said Tristran.

A cold wind blew in from the west, stealing warmth from the travellers' skin. They shivered, and decided it would be prudent to hurry on their way.


End file.
